Healing your deepest wounds

Have you ever wanted to truly break free from the chains of emotional baggage from your past? Were you abused as a child, and it seemed to have scarred your life forever? Many people, even with professional counseling never get the healing and freedom that God intended for us. Do you honestly think that God wants us to struggle through life because of the things which happened to us? Absolutely not! So why are so many Christians struggling with the same issues over and over again throughout their entire life? Why do we have to forgive so-and-so over and over again, and every time she pulls our trigger, we have to make the choice to forgive her once again. The problem never really goes away, it is just suppressed. Is this the kind of victory Jesus wanted us to experience? Absolutely not.

We need to get to the root of things and understand what is really going on in that person’s situation so the real problem can be solved. A good bandaid just doesn’t do the job; we shouldn’t be satisfied with temporary fixes. I want real answers that really work! I want you to stop wishing you could love those who wrong you, but to actually start feeling compassion and love for them, and having the genuine desire to pray God’s will into their lives and feel it in your heart. We all wish we could do that for those who hurt us, but few of us really experience that level of transformation in our hearts. The Holy Spirit wants to heal your deepest wounds so you can live in effortless victory and genuine healing.

We choose to construct our walls

You are in the emotional mess you’re in because of choices you’ve made because of beliefs held sometimes deep with your heart. You may have chosen to put up a wall which blocks you from receiving love because you’ve been hurt and your heart believes that putting up a wall will keep your heart safe from being hurt again. The reality is that it doesn’t work. Your wall doesn’t keep you from getting hurt it only keeps you from freely receiving love as God intended. It’s only through receiving the love of God in your heart that you can be in that safe place that God intended.

“Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands thy walls are continually before me.”(Isaiah 49:16)When we build such walls, we choose to hinder our ability to freely receive love, and the single greatest need that we have (the need to be loved) will not be met (at least in the capacity God intended), and out of that lack of our greatest need being fulfilled, all sorts of emotional and life problems will arise. Almost all addictions, for example, are rooted in our need to be loved not being fulfilled. Our capacity to receive love is hindered by these walls which we have constructed which were meant to protect our heart, but actually cause all sorts of other problems.

If Satan can keep our God-given needs from being met God’s way, we become vulnerable to seeking out alternate ways to meet those needs. Sin for that matter, is usually just a vain attempt to manage our emotional pain and lack of fulfillment. Why do we lash out at somebody when they say the wrong thing? We are making them pay for what somebody else did to us years ago as a child. When we fail to love others, we have fallen into sin, because Jesus commanded us to love one another (John 13:34). However, if our own need to be loved isn’t being met, because of the walls we have constructed in our hearts, it will be difficult to love others because we really can’t freely give something we aren’t receiving ourselves.

Do you want to live the life that God intended for you to walk in? Do you want to freely love others as Jesus commanded? Then you’ll need to work on those walls in your heart, which are hindering your own need for love from being fulfilled. A heart that is not regularly receiving and fully aware of the love of God, is a heart that will not be emotionally healthy, and therefore that person will be prone to struggle with sin as a vain attempt to meet their God-given need to receive and experience His love.

Here’s where the problem lies, we often can’t just let down our walls because whether or not we realize it, we believe that our wall is doing something for us (protecting us from getting hurt). Until we are able to replace the belief that our wall is protecting us, it will be difficult to just let it go. This is why so many people cannot let go of their anger is because what they don’t realize is that their anger is doing something for them.

The key to letting our walls down, is finding out what they are doing for us, and getting truth on them. Until we debunk the lies which cause us to hold on to our walls, we may find it very difficult to truly let go and experience the freedom that God intended.

The Holy Spirit is our counselor

A new approach to inner healing ministry is a very simple process, yet can bring some of the deepest level of healing that we’ve seen. The foundation of this type of ministry is based on these important scriptures:

Traditionally inner healing ministry would give great advise, good scriptures, and try to break away at faulty thinking patterns in the person being ministered to. The new focus is to get the person in a place where they can receive counsel directly from the Holy Spirit, who speaks to their heart and not just their head. While a counselor can help you to change what you logically believe, it is the Holy Spirit that can change what you believe experientially.

Logical belief vs experiential belief

Have you ever known something to be true but just didn’t feel like it was true? Like for example, let’s say you were struggling with feeling forgiven and loved by God. You know from scripture that God loves you and forgives you, but somehow you just don’t feel like that is true. Your emotions tell you otherwise. You struggle with feeling like you are not loved or forgiven, but yet you know it’s just not true. Most of us have struggled with something that we know in our minds is not true, but in our hearts we sure feel like it’s true (that is, if we are honest with ourselves). Did you know that you can hold two opposing beliefs at the same time? Did you know that you can believe one thing in your mind such as “God supplies all my needs” yet the minute you lose your job start having a panic attack? Or no matter how many times you’re told that you are forgiven (and quoted all the great scriptures), you still question or wonder if you really are? That is because what you believe in your mind (logical belief) is not always the same thing that your heart believes because of what you have experienced. A good counselor can deal with what you logically believe and work through your issues on a head-level, but the Holy Spirit will work with you on a heart-level, and that makes a world of difference. I’m not saying counselors are ineffective, but there are many times they only scratch the surface and bring limited healing. God wants to bring deep level healing and complete restoration in that person’s heart. True and genuine healing at the heart level brings lasting freedom and effortless victory for that individual.

The role of our emotions

The western mind has really put many of us at a disadvantage. Many times we are told to deny our emotions, that our emotions can lie, or that we just can’t go by our feelings. I disagree. Our emotions tell us what our heart really believes to be true. If our heart believes we are not good enough to be loved by God, that’s exactly how we will feel, even if we know better in our mind. When a child is taught that it’s unacceptable to cry or show or even feel emotion, they are being taught to bury their pain, and that is very dangerous emotionally. We all need to be real about how we feel. Not that we should ever use our emotions to manipulate others, or that we should go around wearing our feelings on our sleeves, thus making others feel like they are walking on egg shells. None of that is healthy, but it is very important that we be real with ourselves about how we feel. Denying our feelings only suppresses our problems, and serves as a hindrance from us getting getting healed. Our emotions are the bridge to the belief that we hold which keeps us in pain. They tell us accurately what it is our heart really believes.

Our pain is rarely rooted in the present

When somebody triggers us, it is rarely them who is causing the pain we are experiencing. It is rather that they are rubbing against a painful wound in our past. If a boss tells you that your work just isn’t good enough, it would have very little effect if you didn’t already believe that you weren’t good enough. If your parents made you feel ashamed of a B report card as a kid, you may go through life believing that you aren’t good enough. And when somebody comes along and rubs that wound, it will be 10X more painful than if you didn’t have that pre-existing belief about yourself. I hope that makes sense.

If somebody tells us we’re stupid and we know in our heart that we’re not, their words will have little meaning to us. If we already believe that we’re stupid in our heart (even though we know in our head that we’re not), then somebody comes along and speaks the lie that we already believe in our heart, that will trigger us. We’re here trying to deny that awful perceived fact, and how dare somebody comes up to us and tell us something that we’re already struggling with!

Rarely is our present pain caused by the present condition. The present condition is almost always triggering something we already believe about ourselves or about God because of past experiences.